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abb_road writes "Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have banded together and created the Click Measurement Group, with the goal of creating a standard definition for a 'click'. The group will have some access to the three companies' click data, although the access won't be unlimited. The move comes in response to advertisers who claim that click fraud is costing them almost $1 billion dollars a year, and who have hit Google and Yahoo with lawsuits alleging negligence in fighting click fraud."

The value of a story lies mostly in its comments. Sometimes dupes are interesting because new points are brought up, etc. However, if it's about evolution, you can give up any hopes of progress right.... now.

Honestly I find it kind of funny they can get together on click fraud (which can seriously cost them money), but can't come together on a good solution for SPAM, or even the psuedo anonymity (SPF). I know that SPF isn't an antispam solution, it's a partial authentication solution.. but strong SPF requirements by MSN/Hotmail, Yahoo, GMail and AOL would force everyone to start sending email from where it belongs... IMHO it would be nice if email was required to come from an MX server for a given domain.. yea

Having wasted many days on this, if your customer uses Outlook, it *is* hard. Those that I could convince to run Thunderbird had it up and running out of the box first time. Outlook is a nightmare. It is a chinese puzzle. It does not support normal SASL (providing only NT passwords). It only supports STARTTLS (so it can use LOGIN passwords) on port 25. Whenever you change the SMTP port, it resets the IMAP settings to defa

I really enjoyed this part,"Click Monkeys!!(TM) is a Ukrainian company and the giant tanker ship click farm we have stationed just outside U.S. waters off the coast of San Francisco is registered at a Ukrainian berth so we're not subject to any U.S. laws!"

I can't wait to hear about the upcoming joint venture between Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and the U.S. Navy.

"Bill was putting a lot of pressure on us to dominate the web portal business, but we just didn't see how we could build our traffic quickly enough. We turned to Click Monkeys!! to deliver the uniques we needed to show up in the Media Metrix top 20. Thanks to them, I got my bonus, our site is on top of the charts, and Bill thinks I'm great!"
--Product Manager, MSN.com

Hot on the heels of the Amazon "one-click" patent, Microsoft have announced patents on the following technologies:

"Three click" - For newbies"Four click" - For software that takes a long time to load"Ten click" - For people who are expecting an important email real soon."Unlimited click" - Reserved specifically for "Ignore Retry Fail" dialog boxes.

I do not believe that is true. From my understanding, you pay X dollars for Y clicks which will last over Z months, so whether the links are clicked or not, your money will be gone at the end of Z months or until Y clicks are achieved. In that sense, you are not truly increasing their revenue unless the site buys more ads because they are gettting enough volume.

No, I advertise my photography company on Google. You pay per click, worse, you bid per click so pay more for fancier keywords. My photography keywords tend to cost anywhere from.05 - 1.00 per click. Try wedding photography, want to be the first one on the google list? Try $8 or $9 PER CLICK! I seem to have about a 5-10% conversion ratio of clicks to sales, so that's $100 per sale in advertising for a wedding photographer. This is part of the reason I do mostly animals and non-getting-married people. I once heard on PBS that the average consumer spends like $500 a year on advertising. (ie. you buy a coke for $1.00, and coke spends.05 of every dollar they get on advertising, so in their model you just spent.05 on advertising). As a small bidniz owner I'm saddened by all you punks that ignore my ads:-p just my.02. By the way, go to my site and click all the "get a camera free" google links, also click on them on any site you see, then maybe we can put those scammers out of business. I wish google had a "no skeezy" advertising option.

Ted Stevens, senator for Alaska tried explaining how the internet works, when describing why he is against net neutrality.

There's one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service isn't going to go through the internet and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you orde

The move comes in response to advertisers who claim that click fraud is costing them almost $1 billion dollars a year, and who have hit Google and Yahoo with lawsuits alleging negligence in fighting click fraud.

That's rich, advertisers are trying to sue for negligence and fraud. What's next, wives accusing their husbands of having a vagina?!

There's a host of stuff out there that concerns marketers that needs to be cleaned up. It includes impression measurement, it includes click measurement, standardized contracts, so you know for us it's all a big picture of stuff that in order for the maturing of the medium needs to be done. And how big a deal is click fraud? We don't like anything that would give marketers concern, especially if it's a solvable problem.

Translation: We've got a lot of stuff to sift through, which we haven't even started on yet. But it's ok, 'cause the results would only scare people unnecessarily. ANd we don't want that

Search produces results. End of story. It produces results. My guess is that these advertisers would like to see any concern that might seep into the view that their management has, or anybody else. Because they know in their heart of hearts that this really works. It's in everybody's interest to clean this one up.

Translation: We haven't actually asked. We just kinda assumed it's a problem.

What exactly have the search companies pledged to do?

We're going to go forward with developing click-measurement guidelines that will address at a public level all the sort of subsidiary issues of that, which includes fighting globally invalid clicks and also click fraud.

Translation: We had a few ideas scribbled out on a cocktail napkin... but we lost it when one of the associates spilt her apple-tini all over it.

Did Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, and others involved promise to give you unlimited access to their click data?

They have committed the time, the energy, the resources to see this through to a final industry guideline--one that's accepted by not just themselves, but by agencies and by marketers and by the advertising industry overall. Does that mean that they would bring to bear some data and other insights? Absolutely. Could they still have proprietary solutions of their own? Yeah, stuff that might be protected by their own (intellectual property), but they have committed the resources to help.

Translation: First, the asked who we were, then they laughed at us, then said absolutely not. We're coming up with some sort of backup plan though.:(

Media need to operate with transparency. There's marketers and agencies who are paying money for things. They need to know, what are they paying for? What does that look like? What is the standardized way in which that's being counted? And also ultimately, is that audited? Can we validate that (using a third party)? And so, in an industry that is now going to be close to $16 billion this year, it should be relatively obvious that we need to operate with the principles that all media operate under.

Translation: Ok, we just came up with our contingency plan: if we keep asking, and some point they'll have to say "yes", right?

What's the timeframe for creating the click-measurement guidelines?

I've learned through experience with standards I never make a commitment to timelines. It took us 14 months to do the ad-impression guidelines, which is kind of the last big one that we did. We don't really know what we don't know at this point. We could come to a conclusion and say "Geez, we're pretty close. There aren't any outside data--let's get it done." Or we could say, "Hmm, I don't think we're comfortable with that issue, let's dig deeper."

Translation: We have no idea.

What bodies will be involved in auditing, using your definition?

That will be really up to the industry to define that, so in the process of developing measurement guidelines we'll also be developing audit guidelines. That's how we did it in the impression guidelines, so I fully expect to do the same thing.

All three companies involved do so because it is beneficial to their image to be seen fighting click fraud, even though they know that the recommendations for eliminating it will be useless - it's a technology battle, and it will escalate. No matter what the recommendations are, they won't do much to stop persistant abusers of the system. But, on the other side , it doesn't matter.

The real solution here, as usual, is the free market. Advertisers will decide where to spend their ad budget, and they either think this is a problem or not. The solution will boil down to convincing these (probably technologically savvy) ad people to buy ads. That's why having a standard is useful - it looks good. And judging by Google's profits, corporate wallets are voting yes to online ads. If click fraud was a real problem, they wouldn't.

What's also interesting here is that the big 3 search engines (i.e. the things that most consumers would simply label as 'THE internet') are going to create a definition for clicks and possibly some shared base technology. It doesn't really matter how good or bad that definition or technology actually is, since together these 3 are basically the only show in town. They each retain their own differentiation and usage characteristics, but unless the definition or tech aren't that good, advertisers will have t

I'd agree with you. However, with the rate online advertising is growing, and the amount of money they're likely to gain from that growth, the best thing for their bottom line may well be to keep all of this legit and above board.

Defining what counts as a click is a very interesting and difficult problem.
The main trouble is that you have to get a definition such that, even if
the click-spammers know it, they cannot take advantage from the knowledge.

I have the impression that right now, click fraud is fought using statistical criteria to identify real and fake clicks. If you publish a definition of what is a real click, the definition has to be very good and clever, so that fraudsters cannot simply write code that generates fake clicks that satisfy the definition.

I think there would be even more problems with fruad paying per impression. Its extremely simple to make an advertisement invisible on a website. While being paid per impression webmasters have no incentive to actually let visitors see the advertisements. Which is why I suggest some sort of minimum impression / click ratio. The cost of 50 clicks guaruntees you 50 clicks AND 1000 impressions or whatever a decent click through ratio might be.This way no website can have a 100% click through ratio, and if they

If it's that much of a problem, work out on average how many (legitimate) clicks generate a sales lead and pay that much more for actual sales leads generated instead of per-click. Then the whole problem of click fraud goes away (And gets replaced by sales lead fraud.)

How many companies keep track of where their visitors come from so they can properly credit the source? I'd say few to none.So joe visitor visits my site and clicks through to the advertiser's page. With Pay Per Action, Joe Visitor must purchase the product right then in order for me to recieve credit. If Joe Visitor likes what he sees but decides to come back later after talking it over with Mrs Visitor, I don't get paid because he will inevitably go directly to the site rather than reload my site a baz

So let me see if I can get the wording here right... "Click fraud is costing us $1 Billion a year but we can't afford figure out how to track sources." Is that pretty much what you're telling me? 'Cause I have a most excellent idea. Give me a mere 10% of that and I'll damn well figure out how to track sources so you don't have to worry about click fraud again. It'll pay for itself 10 times over in the first year. Lets say... half now and half after I buy a house in the cayman islands *cough* I mean solve th

And the number of ads multiplies like mutated bird flu.The most overused button on a browser these days is the back button as soon as most people realise they have fallen for yet another ad filled and information free page.I can live with some ads, but they are far too cheap if advertisers were forced to pay a little more then perhaps they would spend on effective advertising. maybe even on good product information. I choose hardware carefully now if it hasn't got good linux support I will look for somethin

It's the level 2 DOM event that is triggered after the mouseup event if the position of the mouse hasn't moved a set distance (varies from OSes/Desktop environments) after the previous mousedown event.

Google has suspended my AD Sense account twice for what they deemed "Invalid Clicks", even though there was no absolutely no fraud on my part, and I'm not the only one this has happened to. It's widespread, especially for the small website owners like myself.Consider this...

They give you an account and tell you NOT to encourage your website visitors to visit the sponsors. How stupid is that?

They give you a google search box and and tell you NOT to encourage your website visitors to use it. How stupid is tha

RE: They give you an account and tell you NOT to encourage your website visitors to visit the sponsors. How stupid is that?What? Adsense pays out pretty big for the clicks that I get. I can see why saying on the site, "please click these ads, it will support my time investment and all you have to do is click an ad.", is NOT KOSHER.

RE: They give you a google search box and and tell you NOT to encourage your website visitors to use it. How stupid is that?